If you clone zones from a golden image using ZFS cloning, you get fast, 
efficient dedup for free. Sparse root always was a horrible hack! 

----- Reply message -----
From: "Jim Klimov" <jimkli...@cos.ru>
To: 
Cc: <zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org>
Subject: [zfs-discuss] Summary: Dedup memory and performance (again, again)
Date: Tue, Jul 12, 2011 14:05


This dedup discussion (and my own bad expreience) have also
left me with another grim thought: some time ago sparse-root
zone support was ripped out of OpenSolaris.

Among the published rationales were transition to IPS and the
assumption that most people used them to save on disk space
(notion about saving RAM on shared objects was somehow
dismissed).

Regarding the disk savings, it was said that dedup would solve
the problem, at least for those systems which use dedup on
zoneroot dataset (and preferably that would be in the rpool, too).

On one hand, storing zoneroots in the rpool was never practical
for us because we tend to keep the rpool small and un-clobbered,
and on the other hand, now adding dedup to rpool would seem
like shooting oneself in the foot with a salt-loaded shotgun.
Maybe it won't kill, but would hurt a lot and for a long time.

On the third hand ;) with a small rpool hosting zoneroots as well,
the DDT would reasonably be small too, and may actually boost
performance while saving space. But lots of attention should now
be paid to seperating /opt, parts of /var and stuff into delegated
datasets from a larger datapool. And software like Sun JES which
installs into a full-root zone's /usr might overwhelm a small rpool
as well.

Anyhow, Edward, is there a test for this scenario - i.e. a 10Gb
pool with lots of non-unique data in small blocks?

Thanks,
//Jim

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